One more award and one more book!

It happened last Wednesday. Nicola Davies and I received the School Library Association Information Book Award for our book ‘A First Book of Animals’. Nicola also won the Hachette Children’s Group Award for Outstanding Contribution to Information Books, in a new category introduced this year. CONGRATULATIONS NICOLA!

You can read more about the SLA award here.

It was a nice evening and we celebrated with the lovely editors and designers who did such a great job and helped us to make the book a success.

Later, on my way home, I was thinking how nice it was to work on the book. I remembered how inspired I was at the time I read the Nicola’s text the very first time.  I was actually travelling on the same train.

When I got home, I looked at the old sketches.Some of the final illustrations differ very little from the first sketches.

Like this basking shark for example.

Or the weaver bird.

When you read Nicola’s poems, you can understand how inspired I felt working on the pictures.

The book is now getting published in other countries. Recently in Russia. In USA it’s called ‘Song of the Wild’ and has an orang-utan on the cover.

In Holland the cover has an illustration of a crocodile.

I’m now getting ready for my trip to Prague.

My very first book written exclusively for a Czech publisher is being published!The book is called ‘Dlouhá Cesta’ – Long Journey and it is published by a new publisher Pinwheels.

I’m very excited about it and I will write about the trip next time. This couple of spreads from the book can symbolise my trip to Prague quite well.

One more picture. This one is for me from Jaromir Zidek.Here is also a letter to Father Christmas. Jaromir’s wish is to get ‘The Long Journey’ for Christmas. I believe he will!